Laughing all the way to the cemetery

Nick Hornby has built a career on depression and the things that help him survive - football, music, books. His new novel tells the stories of four would-be suicides, but it's jauntier than ever. Can he really be so miserable? Simon Hattenstone investigates.

For a supposedly feelgood author, Nick Hornby's books aren't half miserable. Take Fever Pitch, his breakthrough memoir. As much as it is about football, it is about a man coping with depression, under-achieving and not belonging. Or High Fidelity, his first novel. Yes, it's the story of a music-obsessed geek, but it's also the story of an emotional illiterate who can't make head nor tail of life. Then there's About A Boy, which features a subplot about a mother trying not to commit suicide, and How To Be Good, which portrays a middle-aged couple striving unsuccessfully to find hope in their relationship.

The thing about all these books is that they are funny and warm and cute, and you don't have to mention the word depression when talking about them. Not so his latest. A Long Way Down is also comic, but there is no masking the subject here. This is depression in spades, or so you'd think. The novel has four narrators, all of them planning to kill themselves on New Year's Eve by jumping off the roof of a high-rise block in north London known as Toppers' House.

"I think there's quite a strong strain of melancholy in there," Hornby says with a grin. Melancholy? That sounds poetic and enriching; isn't this just straight-down-the-line depression? "De-pre-ssion," he says slowly, savouring the syllables. "Yeah. Depression. I think I am naturally depressive." We are eating a breakfast fry-up in a cafe close to his north London home and Arsenal football club. In the background, the coffee machine is making a noise like the beginning of the old Hawkwind song Silver Machine - something he's probably noticed. Hornby is not simply a football nut, he's a music nut and a literature nut. He may be a misery guts, but he's also one of life's enthusiasts.

You could see bits of him in all four narrators - Martin is a C-list celebrity, JJ a failed rock guitarist, Maureen a mother whose life has been blighted because her son is severely disabled, and Jess a wastrel with a successful father. "Yep, yep, yep," he says as I run through the first three characters, then he stops at Jess. "That's funny - I'd never thought about the dad before."

Hornby's history is rather complicated. One potted biography could read: age 48, son of successful businessman Sir Derek Hornby, graduated from Cambridge University, became a literary critic, then bestselling author and friend to the great and good. Another potted biography could read: lower-middle-class son of secretary mother Margaret, drifter, failed teacher, failed journalist, failed screenwriter, achieved surprising success with memoir of a football fanatic and loser. Both biographies would be equally true.

His father, Sir Derek, is a self-made man who ended up as chairman of Rank Xerox. Derek's own father died when he was young; his mother had four children and couldn't afford to bring him up, so she farmed him out to his grandmother. He was a bright lad who benefited from a government scheme to send able boys from poor homes to public school. He met Hornby's mother at their first workplace - he was the office boy, she was the secretary. When Nick was 11, his parents split up. His father, who unbeknown to Nick had begun another family, went to live with them in France and America; Nick remained with his mother, still a secretary in suburban Maidenhead.

It made for a disjointed childhood. "Well, home was extremely normal, but my dad's life was quite exotic really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home."

I tell him that a friend of mine once visited his father's home, and told me it was the biggest house she had ever been in - it even had a lift. "I was thinking about that house the other day ... It probably wasn't the biggest house your friend's ever been in, but it did have a lift. It was a Nash house in Regent's Park and they are quite narrow and steep. It was a Rank Xerox house - he'd been living abroad and that's where they put him up. Mum's was a little house, nice, Barratt home on a new estate, no need for a lift." He drinks his coffee and orange juice chaser, and lights another cigarette.

This dual identity (and lack of identity) was at the heart of Fever Pitch. He loved life on the Arsenal terraces, but he also realised he didn't truly belong there, what with being a middle-class boy from Berkshire rather than a working-class cockney from down the road. Meanwhile, he found it embarrassing to confess his obsession to some of his posher friends, who equated football with yobbery. By the time he started writing Fever Pitch in his early 30s, he was at his lowest ebb. He had given up teaching English to pursue his brilliant career, but the writing was going nowhere, relationships were going nowhere. He'd begun therapy a year or so earlier, but couldn't settle to anything.

"The weird thing was that Fever Pitch came almost straight out of therapy," he says. "I used to go in on Monday afternoon and there was always this awkward thing at the beginning. Before you start getting into things, you sit there, and there's a long pause and she'd say, 'How was your weekend?' and I never knew what to say, so I'd say the same thing every week, which was, 'Rubbish - got beat two-nil,' and 'All right, beat Tottenham.' After about six months, she said, 'Why d'you make the same stupid joke every Monday?' I'd never thought seriously what it was all about."

He realised that it wasn't really a joke. As a child, he had resented his father not being around, but they eventually forged a new relationship through football (his father took him to Highbury because that's where Nick wanted to go). Now he was an adult, football still shaped his week, his hopes and moods. He began to think of Arsenal as a metaphor for his life: boring, boring Arsenal (as they had been for decades), the chippy underachievers, so hard to love because they played such unattractive football.

Hornby hadn't always felt an outsider. He was pretty happy growing up in Maidenhead - it may have been a soulless, insular place, but he felt confident and able within its confines. Then he went to Cambridge, and it wiped his self-belief. "Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay." His first book was a cultural critique called Contemporary American Fiction.

Cambridge also did for his confidence socially. He felt that he was surrounded by fellow students stuffed with certainties and an unquestioning sense of entitlement, and he shrank in the face of such bluster. "That took me a long time to recover from. I liked it in terms of I opted out and didn't do any work, but all the people who were getting on really frightened me - you know, joining the societies as soon as they got there, and writing for the Cambridge newspapers."

So Hornby hung out with the losers and dossers and football fans. The trouble was that, deep down, he wanted to be one of the winners; he just didn't know how to go about it. "I didn't have the confidence to compete."

After university, he fantasised about writing for the New Musical Express, but his diffidence held him back. "It was when Julie and Tony [Burchill and Parsons - Hornby seems to be on first-name terms with everybody] were writing for the NME, and the idea of walking in there and saying 'Giz a job', brought me out in a sweat. I applied for a job on Melody Maker once." Melody Maker wasn't as cool as NME? "That's why I thought I stood a chance. I never heard back from them."

He drifted from Cambridge to London and then back to Cambridge, where he taught English at a comprehensive. He says he was a well-intentioned but inept teacher, too keen to please the pupils. "I was too young, there were riots in the class." Even the pupils who liked him didn't think he was cut out for teaching. "It was quite a hippy school, and one of my O-level kids came up at the end of the day and said, 'I've got some really good blow, d'you want to come back afterwards?' and I said, 'I don't think that's really a good idea', and very sort of pityingly. He said, 'I think you're taking the teacher thing a bit too far.' " He giggles at the memory.

After two years, Hornby quit to write screenplays. Again, it didn't work out. He took lots of odd jobs to supplement his non-income from writing. His family began to despair about what would become of him. I remind him that his sister, Gill Hornby, once said they used to wonder whether he would ever own an overcoat, let alone a house. "Well, that's what I'd spent most of my time thinking," he says.

How did his depression express itself? "I was never suicidal or completely black. I've always been able to enjoy aspects of my life ... It was more an utter conviction of failure - therefore what's the point?"

Was he surprised by his eventual success? "Yes. I assumed that people who were successful were on a completely parallel track, and my track just led to doom and disaster. I thought I was going back to teaching and being extremely unhappy about it for the rest of my life." He pauses, and says it wasn't quite as simple as that. There was also something within that told him Fever Pitch could be a great success, that it spoke to people who hadn't really been represented in books before, that it was a bloody good read.

Fever Pitch gave birth to a whole new genre - lads' lit. To be fair, Hornby's writing was laddishness mediated through the anxious soul of the new man. He wasn't simply a bloke revelling in his blokishness, but a bloke who knew it was wrong to make football life's priority, that it was pathetic to admit he'd rather be at a match than at the birth of his first child, that childishness in a grown man was not an attractive quality.

The book also established the trademark Hornby style - fluent, informal, no fancy stuff.

His follow-up, High Fidelity, did for rock what Fever Pitch did for football. He portrayed his protagonist and his manifold inadequacies entirely through his obsession with music. Of course, we read it autobiographically - here was another boy-man who couldn't commit to anything beyond his record collection.

Hornby's books are full of men who can't, or who refuse to, grow up, absent fathers, struggling mothers and self-loathing characters who tell little lies to service their desires. In About A Boy, the character Will joins a single-parent group, and invents a son for himself in the hope of getting off with young single mothers who'd find any man who isn't a total bastard irresistible. His men are hugely flawed but likable. They may not be good people, but they are good enough constantly to question their motives.

In How To Be Good, David, a cynical, acid-mouthed hack, meets the ridiculous guru DJ Goodnews, who shows him a new path. David starts to give away his children's toys, invites the homeless into his house, and becomes more unbearable than he was in the first place. Hornby often satirises well-meaning liberal types not unlike himself.

At times, his books may seem close to the smug, self-contained world of Richard Curtis movies such as Notting Hill and Four Weddings And A Funeral: the films of Fever Pitch and About A Boy even employ favourite Curtis actors Hugh Grant and Colin Firth as the leading characters. But when the characters of Hornby and Will are transformed into gorgeous blokes, they lose their point and their appeal.

Towards the end of Fever Pitch, a girlfriend called Virginia emerged. She not only became Hornby's wife, she also became an Arsenal season ticket holder. In 1992, the book was published and became a bestseller. But, as Hornby would have expected, life did not go smoothly. In 1993, his son Danny was born. At around 18 months, he went into a terrible reverse. He lost his speech, never recovered it and was diagnosed as severely autistic. Hornby and Virginia helped start the school TreeHouse for autistic children, but the pressure of bringing up Danny, coupled with his new-found fame wreaked havoc on their relationship. Like so many parents of autistic children, they split up. Danny now divides his time between Hornby and Virginia.

He and Danny are as close as they can be, but he says it is a frustrating relationship. "You feel like a bad parent all the time, because, say, you'll be kicking a ball and maybe he'll kick it back once, but then he'll get bored and go off, and then he'll come back, so you try again, but the second time he won't come back, and you think ..." He trails off. Hornby's pale brown eyes looks as if they've spent a lifetime weeping.

In A Long Way Down, Maureen wonders what her mute, wheelchair-bound son Matty would be like if he had been "normal". The book is at its most poignant when she talks about how she has created a life for him - there are posters of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Patrick Vieira on his wall, because, in her imagination, he supports Arsenal (of course) and has the hots for Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Hornby says this is a dramatisation of his relationship with Danny. While he's never gone to Maureen's lengths, he understands why she does it. "One of the projects with Danny is to move him on, to make things more age-appropriate for him. He watches Pingu all the time, and we'd rather he watched Finding Nemo. People have bought him Arsenal shirts for his birthday, and I think , 'What's the point?' but then I think, 'If I think that, what's the point of anything?' He might as well wear an Arsenal shirt as anything else."

Has he ever felt as desperate about Danny as Maureen does about Matty? "I don't think as desperate ... There have been some incredibly difficult times. It's more that, through Danny, I've met a lot of people, and you're exposed to a world where there are incredibly desperate people. And they feel very let down and under an enormous amount of stress, so it's more Danny serving as an introduction to people like Maureen than Danny providing the material."

Actually, he says of the four suicidal types in the novel, he probably feels closest to the failed pop star, JJ. "The thing that interested me was the fear of never being able to fulfil potential, which was a very big thing in me when I was his age. I identify very strongly with the idea that you're in your early 30s and you've got no idea whether this is going to pay off or not, the writing thing, and if it doesn't, what are you going to do? You've told everybody that is what you're trying, and it feels that you're walking a plank and you've just got to keep going because there's a load of people waving cutlasses at you!" Just talking about it seems to bring him out in a cold sweat.

The strange thing about A Long Way Down is that, despite its subject, it's probably the jolliest novel he has written, almost a romp - a suicide romp. Hornby says it was a kind of technical exercise: "I wanted to write a book that rocked, which was about something extremely downbeat, and I wanted to see if I could take these characters from the dark and to the light without being sentimental or unrealistic. If I wrote a book about depression that was incredibly depressing, why would anybody want to read it?"

Hornby can be surprisingly dogmatic about what makes for good art. He's also consistent. In 31 Songs, his book of essays about songs he loves, he argues that the best music is simple and transparent. He includes Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road because it reminds him of becoming successful and finding a voice, and Ian Dury's Reasons To Be Cheerful for its Englishness, plus Dylan and the Beatles. The only reason trendy pop groups don't write songs like the Beatles did, he says, is that they can't.

As much as Hornby's prose is praised for its pared-down simplicity, it has been criticised, too, for lacking depth. For all the ennui and misery, most of his books end on an uppish note. "I think one of the reasons the books work is because people identify with that sort of depression, and they also want to be told that there might be some kind of reason to keep going." Is it a commercial decision, then, to end his books with some kind of hope? He laughs and clicks his fingers with delight. "It would be brilliant if it was a commercial decision. No. No, it's about what I want to believe. It's to offer myself consolation."

Hornby says that of all his books How To Be Good was the most praised by critics. "I had a lot of feedback from proper literary people that that was a proper literary book. Probably because it ended miserably." Does he think there's a snobbery about his writing? "Erm ..." A long time passes. "I don't think it's for me to get into that sort of question."

He has done with his bacon, eggs and mushrooms. He asks if I'd like to finish off his sausage. We swap plates. He orders another coffee and orange juice chaser, and rushes for his next cigarette.

Hornby writes a column for an American magazine called the Believer. It has a wonderful format: at the beginning of each column is an inventory - on the left, the books he has bought that month, on the right, the ones he has actually read. In the magazine, co-founded by Weekend storyteller Dave Eggers (one of Hornby's fashionable younger writer friends), critics are not allowed to review books they do not like. Perfect for Hornby.

His columns have just been collated into a revealing compilation called The Polysyllabic Spree. In one column, he says, "Like a lot of writers, I can't really stand my own writing." Does he mean it? He comes to a stop. "Well, I wish I was better than I am," he says eventually. "When you've written a few, you realise that you do what you do, and then you start reading other people and you think, God, I wish I could do that, but I couldn't in a million years."

Who, for instance? "Erm, errr, Dickens." That's ridiculous - there's only one Charles Dickens. Well, it's not simply that he isn't Dickens, he concedes. "No, some contemporaries ... George Saunders - it's just that he has such a weird imagination. He's really, really different. When you're at the beginning of a writing career, you feel that there are possibilities. It's like life itself ... " He seems to be sinking into a depression. "Well, I suppose everybody who writes wants it all: they want to be culty and they want to be literary and they want to be mainstream." How's he doing on the self-loathing front these days? "Yeah, I think I'm doing well on the self-loathing front." OK, how about a Hornbyesque list of the top five things he can't stand about himself. "I don't think I'm prepared to go there ... There are plenty of things that irritate the hell out of me about myself." This is just like the Hornby of Fever Pitch, who would introduce us to his analyst and then politely close the door.

It's almost lunchtime. We've been in the cafe for well over two hours. I tell Hornby that I'd better be getting off. I'm due to give a talk at a school. It's National Book Week and the school had been hoping to find a well-known author but failed, and I'm stepping in at the last minute. "Would it help if I came down with you?" Hornby asks.

Would it help? Not bloody half, I say. I can sense Hornby already analysing his motives. Has he offered because he wants to come, because it would be a good thing to do, because it will create a favourable impression? When I told him earlier I'd yet to meet somebody who dislikes him, he took umbrage - oh God, not that nice Nick Hornby thing again. It's not even true, he says. "I think I am quite nice in public. I think you'd be an idiot not to be." And in private? "I don't think I'm a nightmare in private, but I'm tetchy and unreasonable."

We step on to the street, and pass a young man with a sky-high Afro. "Oh God, I was dreading this," says Hornby. "It was great when it was cool to be bald, but now hair's back in fashion."

We hail a taxi and plan what we'll talk about at the school. I explain that the children have cerebral palsy, are not likely to have heard of him, and we could maybe talk about football. Isn't it depressing, I say, how football is the only language so many men can speak? "Well, there's music. Then you're bilingual, aren't you? I find it more depressing now, because football is such a huge part of popular culture in a way it wasn't when the book came out." What he means is that he hates the way the middle classes have colonised football - and he hates it even more that some people say Fever Pitch is partly to blame.

I ask if he's working on any other projects. He mentions a number of screenplays - an adaptation of a Lynn Barber memoir, a romantic comedy he's been writing for years with Emma Thompson, both of them likely to go into production shortly, and a stalled film script of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. At times he talks with enthusiasm about his second career as a screenwriter finally taking off, at times he seems relieved there's something he's still struggling with.

We reach the school. The children take to Hornby. We talk about Arsenal and Leyton Orient and meeting Ian Wright and Thierry Henry and the music of Bob Marley, and how Hornby and Colin Firth in the film of Fever Pitch look like identical twins, except, "He made the mistake of having hair, which I always think is vulgar and rather unfashionable and cheap."

We talk a bit about books. One teacher asks if he thinks it's appropriate for children to study Shakespeare as part of the national curriculum. Hornby's answer is the most belligerent I've heard all day. No, he says. Shakespeare is a wonderful poet, but so many pupils can't begin to understand his language, so what is the point? When he was teaching, he says, another teacher told him to teach Macbeth by getting the children to draw pictures of witches. "I couldn't understand how that was teaching Shakespeare; that was allowing them to draw pictures of witches. I think part of the reason I became the writer I became is because of teaching in a school, and you're always looking for this stuff that is really intelligent but really simple and everyone can understand it. I always thought Of Mice And Men was such a perfect book because there's nothing not to understand, but it's still really clever and moving and complicated, but everybody understands the complication. It doesn't leave anybody out. I think that's what books should be like."

We are back on the sunny street. A Long Way Down - and its surprising jauntiness - is still confusing me. I ask if he thinks his depression has changed over the years. He ums and ahs with a diffidence striking even by Hornby's standards. The thing is, he says, since he started writing this book about suicide, life has taken a considerable turn for the better. In fact, he's never been so relatively undepressed. He's had two sons in the past two years with his film producer partner Amanda Posey (whom he met when they were making the Fever Pitch movie), Danny gets on well with them, he still gets on with Danny's mother, the new book's coming out, and he knows it's tempting fate, but he's not so sure that he's even depressed any more.

"Erm ... the last few years have been good. With the two babies, it's been so uncomplicated in a way it wasn't with Danny. That's been fantastic. Football's been good. I'm really happy in my work. I have a very unmiserable partner. She's done me a lot of good, because she's not unrealistic in her uppishness." He's getting carried away on a tidal wave of optimism. "I wouldn't call it depression now. It's just a sort of strain of English miserablism, where you know everything is crap and everyone who pretends it isn't is kidding themselves. Yeah, this is the best it will ever get."

And he looks at me, terrified, as if he's just sold his soul to the devil